Sustaining 'fun'

(Rex) #141

Kendle aren’t you an ET player? If so, I’m a bit disappointed. :frowning:
But I don’t want to push this discussion any further now and I also hope you read the first part of my long post.

(iwound) #142

you think. last time i checked people are suiciding for ammo. a lot. same goes for medic, thats why we have regen.
i cant see the deployable ammo racks filling the gap unless all fops can access them straight away.
id much prefer dead players guns as it feels dynamic.

no ammo or no health in those old games is what was frustrating. thats why they were modded out.

im also all for anything that brink did well coming here.
i hated the style and broken bits. but thats not to say something good can come from it. as it had its moments.

(Kendle) #143

Was, 2003 - 2005.

I don’t disagree with a lot of what you say, only the bit where you try to justify your position by claiming only true SD fans know what makes a good game.

tbh I don’t consider myself an SD fan (sorry guys). I don’t really consider myself an ex-ET player either, I’m an ex-ETPro player. SD didn’t make ET good, an American called Bani made ET good. I never played SD maps in RTCW (Market Garden, yuck). I hardly played ET:QW beyond the demo, I play FPS games to shoot people, not build / use machines to do it for me. I logged about 40 hours in Brink in 2 months, I logged that many hours in BF3 in 2 weeks.

Does any of that invalidate my opinion? Does not being an SD fan mean everything I say translates as “make it COD!”. No, of course not. No offense to anyone here, but you don’t get to have a more “worthy” opinion than someone else simply because you stuck around these forums long enough to get an invite to this Alpha.

(Volcano) #144

[QUOTE=iwound;446936]you think. last time i checked people are suiciding for ammo. a lot. same goes for medic, thats why we have regen.
i cant see the deployable ammo racks filling the gap unless all fops can access them straight away.
id much prefer dead players guns as it feels dynamic.
.[/QUOTE]

even you should remember back when the players dropped ammo wound that noone had the need to play fops because then it used to give you a full clip rather than what was actually left in that clip ( say 10 bullets left)

(warbie) #145

[QUOTE=iwound;446936]you think. last time i checked people are suiciding for ammo. a lot. same goes for medic, thats why we have regen.
i cant see the deployable ammo racks filling the gap unless all fops can access them straight away.
id much prefer dead players guns as it feels dynamic.[/QUOTE]

It’s difficult. This wasn’t a problem in RTCW as the maps were smaller in overall scale and with fewer objectives. There was nearly always a field ops nearby. The whole synergy between classes worked great and everything built on that - which is why it was so good. In every game since RTCW this balance has been skewed to varying degrees - be it due to ammo dumps, being able to pick up guns, health regen, lots of objectives and huge maps spreading players out etc - and the core teamplay suffered. This is why we now have a team of individuals feel rather than a team of people working together. The cramped twisty turny maps also make it play out like tdm with objectives sprinkled on top.

These things weren’t modded out to avoid frustration - they were replaced with work arounds at the expenxe of teamplay after the core balance had been borked.

(Bangtastic) #146

In DB netcode/interpolation whatsover seems rather fine, but spraying randomly is daily bread. (at least for me)

CS; when you got the shot it is one of the most satisfying shooter when it comes to this term. i would describe it as compact straight gameplay. (lost for words^^) i dont play it too long nor excessive or on a high level, but thats why i always come back to it since years.

DB has already ridicoulus powerful weapons, but they dont feel powerful yet. All feel really light and like im shooting water bubbles despite it dmg it deals. I think it is really important to close this psychological gap ( better sounds incoming as we learned but that might be not the whole solution).

(iwound) #147

you just answered that for me by hinting at the solution.

none of that has anything to do with teamplay.

[QUOTE=warbie;446949]
These things weren’t modded out to avoid frustration - they were replaced with work arounds at the expenxe of teamplay after the core balance had been borked.[/QUOTE]

your arguing about semantics.

not for me. whats your pc specs?

re teamplay. i dont think its necessarily about sticking together but working together.
this will show itself more as the minimap becomes more defined giving better feedback to where team-mates are.

(Volcano) #148

[QUOTE=iwound;446958]you just answered that for me by hinting at the solution.
[/QUOTE]
I think the reason behind people not getting ammo is that either they aren’t communicating with the fops or the fops cant tell due to the current UI, fops is my main class in this and im spamming packs out all the time but it seems the players dont notice them maybe not bright enough to spot /shrug. I really dont see an issue with the weapons dropping whats left in the mag i was thinking that the weapon itself could drop unlike the old method of the ammo box but someone is bound to bring up the question as to why the player can’t pick up that persons weapon and use it ( like exchanging the mp40 for the thompson)

(Kendle) #149

I also play F/Ops most of the time (I’d play Medic, but there’s already too many most of the time). I do my best to ensure everyone has ammo, but I do find some packs go un-used because they don’t get noticed. Could do with being highlighted and made brighter I guess.

I do however think that no ammo drop (and no health regen) are the key concepts that enforce team-work. Yes it can be a pain needing ammo and not being near a F/Ops (or your team only having 1 perhaps). If that’s the case go F/Ops yourself, or petition your team-mates to go F/Ops. It was this kind of “peer pressure” that ensured RTCW worked so well. There were times when we didn’t have enough of a particular class, but that only served to motivate people to play the classes that were needed, or moan at their team-mates to switch to something more useful.

If you allow team-work to NOT be needed, because you can scavenge the resources you need yourself, they don’t complain when team-work is not employed. Murphy’s Law, anything that can go wrong will go wrong. :slight_smile:

(warbie) #150

Well put.

10 char

(iwound) #151

you could increase ammo to players by simply indicating on minimap where your fops are, or add dropped supplies to map.
but that doesnt automatically mean they will give you some.

you dont want too much ammo that negates ammo supplies.
but not too little that players just suicide.

you need to be able to distribute more to players running out while fighting.
and even if you have 2 fops near you doesn’t guarantee more ammo. as they are underfire as much as anyone.

i think a better minimap will improve things. but if still there tended to be a gap in supplies then
dead players ammo could fill that gap if say limited to 10% of a full ammo pack.
just to make do untill a better supply came along.

we wont know until we get a better minimap plus proper spawn waves.

(Volcano) #152

med packs should be white and red and the ammo packs possibly orange, why orange? its normally associated with dangerous goods, with those colours they should be easily visible and they are distinctly different so you know which one to aim for

(BomBaKlaK) #153

yep I really think a change can be much appreciated, this green is really ugly ! :stuck_out_tongue:

(sunshinefats) #154

[QUOTE=Anti;446880]
DB needs to take the best bits of our previous titles, the bits that still stand up in today’s FPS market, as well as modernizing in some areas. Through this alpha we’re figuring out what is still relevant and what isn’t.[/QUOTE]

And herein lies the problem…you’re failing to take the best bits of the previous titles on a number of levels…This is what most of the moaning is ultimately about here in my opinion.

(Ashog) #155

We should ask Draska for that! ^^

Sorry couldn’t help :stuck_out_tongue:

(Anti) #156

I’d say we’ve not yet finished deciding what we should and shouldn’t take. The game is in alpha, we’ve not finished making it or finalized its gameplay.

(acutepuppy) #157

It is really difficult to pin down what makes an element of classic gameplay integral. It’s even more difficult to simply “modernize” an aspect. Some of them are surprisingly difficult to conceptualize, such as health regen. It will always change the relationship between attacker and defender, as well as map spacing and cover importance. If a game has health regen, I believe that asymmetrical teams may be the best solution to achieve true balance. That’s another conversation.

Using simple building blocks of design will lead to various meta-game strategies and “notches” in the skill curve.

This can be in combat.
-Learning weapon damage/accuracy/range
-Understanding grenade priming
-Understanding the intricacies of specialty weapons like Rocket Launchers that require spawn-time knowledge and map awareness, or a true heavy MG that requires a mix of spacing and positioning.

It can be in movement.
-Learning how movement effects weapons, especially how grenades and rockets behave with jumping and the like.
-Understanding trick jumps for efficiency, either in general movement or for clutch defuses from spawn.
-Knowing when to tap out, when to wait for the revive in terms of spawn time, distance to spawn, room control, objective status.

These things are being tuned and tweaked, but so far most of the abilities are just combat related and very one-dimensional.

What is missing in large part, is tactical awareness and map control. I believe that the other factors are being over tweaked, when this element REALLY needs to take solid form. It’s like painting with red and yellow… we need that blue hue, or something will just seem off.

The lack of depth stems from things like artillery/airstrike. They are functionally different, but they suffer from not being role-defining or game changing. In Quake Wars the artillery had three types, were very powerful and had very different uses. They could be destroyed from a point of origin, could be countered by an engineer with an Artillery Interceptor in their own territory, or disabled by a covert ops. So the Airstrike had no counter, except for the soft-counter of jumping on the canister (which would still hurt the target), but was limited in ability. The artillery was game-changing in tactical situations, but had two class-based hard-counters, and the soft-counter of attacking it directly with grenades.

I was never good at straight-up combat, but I knew EVERY soft and hard counter to every deployable, vehicle, and gadget. I knew how long it took to trick jump up the stairs and finish a defuse, I had a grenade primed, and I made sure to communicate when to have the Field Ops drop artillery on their spawn route, and the covert placed a third eye in the right spot.

That is depth. That is awesome. That took large maps and focused them into two “battles” per objective. London Bridge could be a lot of fun with more territory control factors, especially a larger data-core building.

Pretty much every class-defining gadget (turrets, heartbeat sensors, artillery) should be this deep with active and passive abilities, each with hard and soft counters. The more power and depth you give to these tools, the stronger they can become, without leading directly to killing NewbieFlak857 over and over until he quits and never comes back. They lead to WINS.

The true form of modernization isn’t in lighting effects and grim-dark. Gamers are more and more accepting to bright colors, clean environments, simplified weapons, etc… What really matters is having a sleek HUD, that displays information in a modern way (animation, intuitively color coding, intuitive sound queues, etc…) The new era of gamers are VERY good with interfaces and processing auxilery information. Pump it out to guide players, and allow them to easily disable “tooltip” style factors as they progress.

On the note of asymmetric teams, having a natural attacker with a limited range mobile ability (third eye camera, instant revives), and a natural defender (ammo-to-health transfer, spawn hosts, shield bubbles), made the counter-strategies SO much more interesting.

-Puppy

(Kendle) #158

From the few games I’ve played tonight my over-riding feeling is that the game is, currently, fundamentally borked due to the relative differences between the attacking team attempting an objective and the defending team being able to prevent them, certainly in the context of this thread in terms of what saps the “fun” out of the game.

Example: LB 1st stage, killed a guy near the ramp, went straight to the EV and only got 10% on it before that same defender had respawned and shot me. 2nd stage it took several plant / defuse cycles to blow the 1st barrier, including a few times we managed to blow it and they rebuilt it in what seemed like a split second, it hardly had time to touch the ground before it was up again.

It takes what seems like ages to do anything, which the defense can undo in a fraction of the time. It’s soul-destroying to continually bang your head against the wall like that, only ever moving on to the next stage because by some random fluke the C4 blew before defense could defuse it for the 637th time.

In terms of game design it generally ensures the maps last 20 minutes, it probably shows up as a positive on SD’s Echo data in terms of average time to do things and average stage duration etc. etc. But it’s fun-sapping in the extreme, and I can only stomach a map or 2 of this game at the moment before I have to leave and go take a chill pill.

(INF3RN0) #159

That doesn’t really make sense to me. Surely you can make a game easy to learn and still have it be original in most aspects. It would be pretty hopeless if people could only understand what they’ve already played… that’s where there’s a problem with even the hardcore SD fans not wanting to have to learn or adapt to new things.

(INF3RN0) #160

The best example to explain the problem was the early shooting mechanics. You can’t take one system and then mash it into another without taking into account how they function separately and then predict how they will function together. I’m referring to the early system of high rof + burst/tapping mechanics in combination with the damage counters. The burst/tapping portion was completely lost because hold fire spraying won fights consistently and thus the system was flawed. Body shot spraying had a plain faster TTK than tap firing headshots. If the rof was lower and the headshot multiplier greater, then the burst/tapping would have definitely been viable and players would have had to cope with more advanced weapon control if they wanted to gain the upper hand.

So to sum it up the problem I see is that there are ideas being combined from various games that just can’t coexist unless heavily modified. I’ll keep trying to focus my feedback on how you can attempt to make some of these things work, but overall it’s less about the “best of this and the best of that” and more so about “does this game mechanic actually work with that game mechanic”.

The rest is just losing out on complex content in an attempt to over simplify or remove non-user friendly mechanics we might be used to, but then not filling the hole with something new. I strongly feel like there should be less simplification and more of an attempt at maintain as much content as possible by making it easier to understand for the average player. People are always going to have to practice to perfect anything, but if the focus is put on the learning experience rather than making the experience itself easy you get a better game.